MY FATHER, MY SON

His voice is veiled as he asks me to help him to stand up, he wants to go home.

"Help me stand up" he says, "I want to go home. My mother will be wondering where I am!"

Even if I could help him to stand up, he is so physically weak and depleted now, that I think we both would fall.

Late yesterday afternoon, when I was about to leave him for the day, I asked him if he minded that I should go, assuring him as I do every day that I will see him again in the morning.

"If I am here ..." he replies.

"Where else would you be?" I ask him.

"In Heaven!"

How his broken voice it breaks me and so, I arrange with hospital staff for me to stay with him the night. Several hours earlier he had told me that there were people gathering about us in his room. Looking to either side of me, firstly over my left shoulder and then to my right, they who were there not for me but only him were dressed in white.

"Do you recognize any of them?" I ask him.

He raises a boney finger and replies: "Just one!"

I ask him who the person is that he recognises and he tells me that it is himself.

"What age are you?" I ask him.

"I am 15!"

At the time of writing this, I have been by his side a full thirty-four and a half hours.

Inasmuch does his mind meander, I am never not so knowing of what he means.

"Lift me up, I want to go home!" he says over and over: "I want to go home!"

Holding his hand, I tell him that although I cannot lift him up physically, I can at least lift him up toward Spirit, and I place my other hand at where his heart is and say to him: "Home is where your heart is! If you live within the home that is your heart, you will always have Love; you will always know Love: God's Love!"

"I want to go home!"

Massaging his chest gently in a clockwise rotation, because the motion of Life is always forward even after Death, yet without actually lifting my hand from his ever weakening heart, I lean forward and whisper into his ear that he can go.

"Go home! You do not have to stay, just know that I love you!"

"And I love you!"

He is even weaker now but not yet gone, and I do not think that I have ever known of a moment so innocent as this, the lingering of a Life as do the Guardians of Love they prepare His way.

His doctor visits with me. She is concerned for me that I have stayed the night, telling me I need to look after myself.

Squeezing his hand a little tighter in mine I look at her and say: "I Am"

Another day passes during whose time he is bathed twice in his bed, first in the morning and then again at night: Bed Bath Lite. The ritual of cleansing a rite of passage now, water, glycerin, gels and fragrant oils, they do not soil the sheets but soothe his skin, tissue-paper thin.

He breathes in and breathes out ever more purposefully on the exhale, and I copy the sequence of sighs sorrowfully, that none too cold each pant becomes, nothing so irregular, not just yet. I would bet myself he would live another year but for my fear the end is near we both do know it, and I think to myself how stealthily the dusk does creep before the breaking of each new dawn a waking day, how we live to die and die to live reborn.

With his cheek resting softly upon the pillow I lay my head at his side. He places his hand on my head and touches my hair. and I want more than anything for him to keep it there.

As his breathing becomes more shallow I chant: "Everything I am is of you; all my love is yours!" "Everything I am is of you; all my love is yours!" but then to add: "If you take my heart with you when you go, my love will be with you and forever more, because of the love I give to you are you a part, two soles, one heart!"

I dim the light to dull the play of shadows upon his features that I see only myself in him now.

And then, at the eleventh hour of my stay this day he takes his last breath and quietly slips away, into the silent land where there is only Love and Time it has no borders, bound not by night neither lit by day, only Love! Love has sped him away!

Leslie James Wilcher 1603.1923 - 20.08.2022)